


In re Winner Holdings Corp. Derivative Litig.

by resjudicata



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Capitalism, Coffee, Corporate Finance, Depositions, Elevators, Flashbacks, Funerals, Heteronormativity, Lawsuits, Legal Proceedings, M/M, Male OC - Freeform, Patriarchy, Post-War, Space Physics, Stonks, ZERO System, daddy winner was jeff bezos in space, female oc - Freeform, fiduciary duties, how to face Mecca from outer space, it was capitalism all along, legalese, mixed format, reckoning with being the space one percent, sad gay smooches, shareholder derivative litigation, transcript
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27337336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resjudicata/pseuds/resjudicata
Summary: “I used to think the Gundam was the deadliest power that anyone handed to me when I was a teenager, but now I’m not so sure,” Quatre said.
Relationships: 3x4, Quatre Raberba Winner & Heero Yuy, Trowa Barton/Quatre Raberba Winner
Comments: 17
Kudos: 19





	In re Winner Holdings Corp. Derivative Litig.

**Author's Note:**

> The main character of this fic is a dude named “Quatre Raberba Winner.” The OC names are meant to sound more like that than names people are more likely to have in the real world.

> _In re Winner Holdings Corporation Derivative Litigation_
> 
> TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, A.C. 206  
>  OFFICES OF ALIF & PARTNERS INTER-SPHERE ATTORNEYS  
>  10:00 A.M.
> 
> Deposition of QUATRE RABERBA WINNER, held before Mia N. Sabah,  
>  a Registered Professional Reporter and Notary Public of the L4 Colony Cluster.
> 
> APPEARANCES
> 
> Attorneys for the Witness:  
>  L. Terza Rajab, Esquire  
>  Octavian Alti Wahed, Esquire  
>  KAMISIN & MUFTI LLP
> 
> Attorneys for the Plaintiffs:  
>  Dursun Yuz Ford, Esquire  
>  Hana Asharah, Esquire  
>  ALIF & PARTNERS INTER-SPHERE ATTORNEYS
> 
> QUATRE RABERBA WINNER
> 
> The deponent herein, after having been first duly sworn, was deposed and testified as follows:
> 
> EXAMINATION BY MR. FORD
> 
> Q. Good morning, Mr. Winner.
> 
> A. Good Morning.
> 
> Q. Would you state your name and address for the record, please?
> 
> A. Quatre Raberba Winner. My primary home address is ████████████████████, ██████████ ███████████████.
> 
> Q. Are you here to testify about the case today?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. And are you represented by counsel in this matter here today?
> 
> A. Yes, I have Ms. Rajab and Mr. Wahed here with me today.
> 
> Q. Are these attorneys representing you in your personal capacity?
> 
> A. Yes. They are not affiliated with any of the Winner companies.
> 
> Q. Let's go over some basics. Have you ever been deposed before?
> 
> A. Not -- not exactly.
> 
> Q. What do you mean, "not exactly"?
> 
> A. I was in the Sanc Kingdom during the war, so afterward I gave my sworn testimony to the Earth Sphere Unified Nation tribunals. But that was ten years ago, and it wasn't quite like this.
> 
> Q. Right. I imagine the way this works is a little different, so I'll give you a brief overview of what to expect. Basically, what's going to happen is I'm going to ask you several questions on the topics listed in our notice, which you've had a chance to review. It is my job to ask questions that you can understand, so if you need me to rephrase anything, or if you need clarification on any of these questions, I ask that you please tell me, and I'll do my best to make sure that you can understand. If you answer a question, I'm going to assume that you understood it. Does that make sense?
> 
> A. Yes, sir.
> 
> Q. Great. We have a lot to cover, so we can take a break any time you need it, but I ask that if there is a question that you haven’t answered that you answer as best you can before the break, and we can pick up from there afterwards.
> 
> A. I can do that.
> 
> Q. Likewise, your attorney may object to certain questions, but because we don't have a judge here to decide the objections, we can't resolve all of them now. Unless I say that the question is withdrawn, you should still answer, and we can redact your testimony as necessary, after the fact. Do you understand?
> 
> A. I understand.
> 
> Q. And there are a few courtesies we should observe for the benefit of the court reporter, who's taking the transcript of this proceeding in real time. Let's not speak over each other. I'll let you finish answering your questions before following up or asking another, and I ask that you let me finish asking the questions before you start answering. And of course, since the reporter is only taking down our words, you can't just answer a question by nodding, shaking your head, saying "uh huh" -- nothing like that. All answers should be in words.
> 
> A. Of course.
> 
> Q. Just to be clear, you should understand that your responses in this deposition are under penalty of perjury, the same as if you were on the witness stand in court. You'll be given an opportunity to go over the transcript and have the opportunity to correct any mistakes. However, you should understand that if you subsequently try to correct your testimony, that an inference can be drawn about your credibility, and the corrections can be used against you. Do you understand?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. Are you suffering from any medical conditions that would affect your ability to understand and-or answer any questions today?
> 
> A. No.
> 
> Q. Are you under the influence of any medications that would have that effect?
> 
> A. No.
> 
> Q. Is there any other reason that you believe you are not competent to testify at this time?
> 
> A. No.
> 
> Q. Thank you. Let's start by setting out some background. We're here about an action filed by a group of shareholders on behalf of Winner Holdings Corporation, the ultimate parent company of the Winner conglomerate, commonly known as "Winner Corp" or just "Winner." For the record, if we're going to refer to the company, let's use the shorthand "Winner Corp" rather than just "Winner" to reduce confusion with yourself, Mr. Winner.
> 
> A. Of course. That makes sense.
> 
> Q. And you understand that, though we may refer to specific assets held by specific subsidiaries, when we refer to Winner Corp assets generally, this may include interests held either directly by the holding company or indirectly by one of its subsidiaries?
> 
> A. I understand.

* * *

There was no body at Zayeed Winner’s funeral because the salvage teams couldn't retrieve enough of him to bury from the wreckage of the resource satellite where he’d died. Cremation was forbidden in Islam, but he hadn’t technically been cremated, just burned beyond recognition.

Iria escorted Quatre to the service, shielding him with her body as they hurried out of the black limousine into the masjid. She was still technically under observation for the concussion she’d suffered on the shuttle with Quatre, and yet she was still doing everything to care for her baby brother. But her efforts couldn’t hide the crowd of people waiting outside, holding signs with pithy, righteous slogans that compared the Winner family to dictators. What fools, Quatre thought, and when he laughed to himself, he passed it off as a sob and then covered it with a cough. He had never understood the purpose of the rule against wailing at a funeral, which seemed to serve the Prophet’s distaste for spectacle more than of any spiritual purpose.

Even after pushing past the protest and into the through the front doors, angry shouts penetrated the walls of the building. “Shame on Winner,” echoed faintly through the halls, as Quatre followed Iria to the prayer room. “Shame on Winner.”

With his father gone, maybe the protesters meant to shame Quatre himself. They didn’t know there was nothing left they could say to him.

In the prayer room, Quatre took his place at the front for the Salat al-Janazah, while Iria joined a group of women at the back. Quatre recognized his sisters Aya and Noor, who were involved with the company; Rabia and Mille, who were closest to him in age; Zenaida, whose wedding he remembered the most clearly from when he was a child; Asma, who was a famous beauty. The rest were vaguely familiar at best. Names floated in his head—Sixtine, Soraya, Basira—but he couldn’t match them to faces. Iria had become one of his favorite sisters over the past week, treating him with a loving familiarity, but if she hadn’t been there in the hospital room where he woke up, he might not have remembered her name at all.

With a pang of shame, Quatre realized how ludicrous it really was that he didn't even know if all of those women were his sisters. Some shared his and Iria’s light eyes, blond hair peeking from the edges of the hijabs they wore in the house of worship, and others had the intense, angular look of their father. One woman’s chestnut hair spilled out from under her scarf in a fall over one eye, but it reminded Quatre more of Trowa Barton than of Zayeed Winner (and maybe he would rather think about Trowa than his late father, when, among other things, Trowa hadn’t disappointed him lately). Quatre should have known all of his sisters, but his family shouldn’t have had so much money, even if it was only colonial new money, that he could have 29 sisters that didn’t even all grow up in the same house as him. That house—his house now, he supposed, or, more properly, his mansion—was big enough to hold 30 siblings and then some.

Iria found Quatre after the prayer and led him to the hearse. He was a man of the family, _the_ man of the family, so he joined his uncles and cousins in carrying the empty casket to the family plot. Quatre said the words, he threw his three handfuls of dirt, and he watched as a technician sealed off the grave and aligned the casket with the others, beneath the artificial ground.

There was no way to know what direction Zayeed Winner’s remains faced as they floated in the debris field orbiting Earth, but at least the empty air inside his casket would always face Mecca. It was typical in colonies at L4 for a set of motorized axles to run beneath every cemetery, so that the bodies below could spin against the ring’s rotation, and the dead could continuously turn towards Earth, and, by extension, its holiest site. Burial had always been that way in L4, even in times when the Earth had restricted visas, and entire generations would be buried pointing towards a pilgrimage site they had never visited.

In the old Earth movies Quatre had watched growing up, it was always raining at funerals. Men and women would stand weeping beside the grave holding large, black umbrellas. It didn’t rain in the colonies, and Quatre thought if he had a black umbrella, he’d be just as likely to hold it up against the rain as stab someone with it. And of course, he couldn’t weep. Not only would the Prophet not approve, Quatre was the man of the family now. He had to be strong.

After it was over, a woman clamped her hand over his shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to go eat.”

“Iria?” Quatre turned around, but it was the woman with the chestnut hair, her scarf untied and draped over her shoulders.

“Wrong sister,” she said, but she smiled softly and tilted her head at him kindly, in a way that seemed just like what he’d learned to expect of Iria in the short time he’d come to know her. He wondered how many of his sisters had adopted the same mannerisms, or if he did anything familiar to them. “Suha. You don’t remember me?”

“Of course I remember you,” Quatre said, in a hollow voice. He was lying, and he knew she could tell.

“You’re the heir, so you’re going to be taking care of the rest of us with the family money until we’re all old and gray,” Suha said. “But for now, you’re our baby brother, and you’re the youngest in a family full of orphans. We’ll take care of you. Yalla, habibi, come on.”

Her voice was clear and matter-of-fact, and her touch on his arm was gentle, but Quatre could feel the bitterness in her heart as she led him towards the row of waiting cars. Like Quatre, Suha didn't hate their father, but she hated that he bought into his own bullshit, and her rage reflected his own as though through a fractured mirror. Even when he knew her resentment was towards the society that had decided that a fifteen-year-old boy was more a worthy heir than more than two dozen adult women and not towards the boy himself, it was hard not to take it personally when he was that boy, and he’d never asked for any of it. He hated what was becoming of the colonies every bit as much as Suha did.

“Suha,” he said, as he followed his sister into the backseat of a black car. Unlike Iria, she didn’t take any pains to hide the protestors from him when they passed the throng at the cemetery gates. She slammed the door shut behind them. “Iria said Father was kind. She said he was kind, and they killed him for it. Do you believe that?”

Even without the heart of outer space to guide him, he could have felt the answer rolling off of her in waves. Suha snorted and rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask me to speak ill of the dead, little brother,” she said.

“Fine,” he shot back. “Speak ill of Iria.”

“Iria? If you insist. Our sister is sweet, but there’s a reason she was the first one Father let you see when he was trying to bring you back into the fold. Iria thinks she’s so smart because she’s a doctor, but she doesn’t know how her patients actually live. She doesn’t know the first thing about running the business, so she believed everything our father told her. I bet she fed you the line about how our family is practically giving our resources away to build prosperity in space.”

Quatre nodded, but he didn’t have to. She saw and continued, “The only prosperity the Winners have built is our own. Maybe everyone else hates us for it, but can you blame them?”

“I’ll do a better job running the family company,” Quatre resolved. “I’ll be kinder. I’ll show them how much they really need us, how important and how good we can be. Then, they’ll be sorry for what they did to Father.”

Suha laughed, joyless. “You think that’s what I want for you, little brother? Someone who’s not as bad as our father to run the company? Do _you_ want to run the company?”

She never told him what she did want. Less than a month later, he had destroyed a fully-staffed OZ resource satellite and Colony 06E3. Whatever his sister had in mind, whatever she thought he wanted, it almost certainly wasn’t that.

* * *

> Q. What is your relationship with Winner Corp?
> 
> A. I'm the majority shareholder of the company -- 51% -- and I hold director and officer positions in various entities within the corporate structure.
> 
> Q. And do these director and officer positions include a position in the holding company?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. Okay. Thank you. Do you understand what this case is about?
> 
> A. Yes. There is a minority shareholder -- are some shareholders, I think -- who believe that I abused my majority position to hurt the company, so they're suing me and some others on behalf of Winner Corp.
> 
> Q. Can you tell me, briefly, what Winner Corp does?
> 
> A. Gladly. Winner Corp is a conglomerate, and we're involved in several different industries. The largest subsidiaries by revenue are Winner Resources -- mining, mostly of natural resource satellites -- and Winner Industries and Winner Motors -- industrial manufacturing. And of course, the Winner Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the company.
> 
> Q. What is your position at Winner Corp?
> 
> A. I'm the President of the Board of Directors of the parent holding company and I hold various positions on the subsidiary boards, either as a director or a board observer. I'm also President and Executive Director of the Winner Foundation.
> 
> Q. For now, let's focus on your role in the parent company. When did you become President of the Board of Directors?
> 
> A. When I became eighteen.
> 
> Q. Why did you become President of the Board of Directors?
> 
> A. I'm the majority shareholder. I voted myself into the position.
> 
> Q. How long have you been the majority shareholder?
> 
> A. Since I was fifteen.
> 
> Q. How did you become the majority shareholder?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. This is all a matter of public record, and we provided corporate books and records, including the ownership statements, in discovery.
> 
> FORD: The corporate ownership statements don't say how it is Mr. Winner became the majority shareholder.
> 
> RAJAB: Why don't we stipulate that Mr. Winner inherited his shares? There is no need to discuss the circumstances of Zayeed Winner's passing in this deposition.
> 
> FORD: Duly noted. Withdrawn.
> 
> BY MR FORD:
> 
> Q. Are you an only child, Mr. Winner?
> 
> A. No. I have twenty-nine older sisters.
> 
> Q. And how much equity do your sisters have in Winner Corp?
> 
> A. Altogether? Or each of them individually?
> 
> Q. Either. Whatever you can tell us, Mr. Winner.
> 
> A. Well, I suppose it doesn't make much difference. If I'm the majority shareholder, it's obvious none of my sisters have very much stock in the parent company, individually. They have significant interests in various of the subsidiaries, and many are bondholders, but our father's will left each of his daughters less than one percent of the total shares of common stock in Winner Holdings. And I have almost all of the preferred shares.
> 
> Q. So does this mean that you can outvote your sisters?
> 
> A. On some votes, yes. I can pass a majority vote resolution on my own shares alone. But for a lot of things -- actions requiring supermajority approval -- I still need at least a third of the minority shares to vote with me before they pass.
> 
> Q. And why do you think you got so much more voting power than your older sisters?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. You're asking Mr. Winner to speculate on the motives of a man who's been dead for eleven years. This is behind the scope of what was noticed.
> 
> FORD: Withdrawn. How often do you vote your shares to the action that the company ultimately takes?
> 
> A. That's not fair. I -- just because I vote for something that passes doesn't mean I used any improper influence to _make_ it pass.
> 
> Q. Answer the question, Mr. Winner.
> 
> A. I have never voted on the losing side.

* * *

Rashid lowered his own cup from his lips. Quatre hadn’t yet taken a sip of his own coffee, and he watched a slow curl of steam rise out of the cezve between them. Rashid was more than just built like a tank; his taste buds were also indestructible, and any normal person would burn themselves on coffee that fresh. For all Quatre was increasingly sure that he _wasn’t_ a normal person, he liked taking his coffee slow.

He traced his finger around the edge of his demitasse cup, where the smooth ceramic was lined with a fine circle of gold leaf. “As nice as it is to catch up, there’s a reason I wanted to talk to you,” he said.

“Oh? Do you need something, Master Quatre?”

Quatre smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling fondly. “For one thing, how many times do I have to remind you that you don’t have to call me ‘Master Quatre’ anymore?”

“As you wish, Mr. Winner,” Rashid said, and for a second, Quatre almost took him seriously.

“I don’t _need_ anything,” Quatre said carefully. “But there is something. You see, I’m turning eighteen soon.”

“The twelfth, right?” Rashid asked. “Happy birthday.”

“Thanks.” Quatre plucked a piece of baklava from the serving dish between them and dropped it onto his saucer, next to his still-too-warm coffee. He remembered Trowa telling him once about the European superstition—Russian, he thought, or maybe it was German—that fed a taboo against wishing someone happy birthday too soon. Two years ago, an early birthday wish might have made Quatre nervous, but the Earth Sphere had been at peace long enough that no part of him expected to die before the actual date.

“A lot of things change when I turn eighteen,” he explained. “I’ll be eligible to join the Winner corporate board of directors, and I have the votes to install myself—I have almost enough shares on my own, and I know some of my sisters will support me. There are some others, the traditionalists, who don’t like to see the company without a Winner man at the head of the board. I don’t necessarily agree with their reasoning, but they’ll support me too, at least at first.”

“That’s great.” Rashid seemed confused but encouraging. “I can’t say I understand how these corporate dealings work, but I’m glad you’re finding a way to make them work to your advantage.”

“That’s the thing,” Quatre said. “I wanted to ask if you _could_ learn it.”

“I don’t really need to—” Rashid began, at the same time as Quatre said, “Because I want to appoint you as CEO.”

“Master Quatre—” Rashid apparently forgot that, only moments ago, he had agreed not to use the honorific. “I’m not a businessman. It’s not my world.”

Quatre nodded. “I know. It’ll be a harder sell than getting myself onto the board of directors, but I think I have the votes on the board too. Some of them are the same people who would vote with me just because I’m a Winner, but there are others you impressed with the colony reconstruction projects. You’re a leader, Rashid, and people recognize that. People trust you. _I_ trust you, and I need someone I can trust.”

“A leader first on the battlefield. I’ve been a fighter my whole life,” Rashid pointed out. “That doesn’t align with the company’s commitment to pacifism.”

Quatre shrugged. He finally lifted his coffee to his mouth, holding the tiny cup daintily between two hands, and took a sip. “Do _I_ align with the company’s commitment to pacifism?” he said.

“It’s different,” Rashid said. “I’ve never hidden my battles.”

It felt like a low blow, even though Quatre knew Rashid would never mean it that way.

“I wasn't fighting to be recognized by the people,” Quatre admitted. “I used to think someday they would see the truth. But I think they’ve known the truth all along. Or at least they knew _a_ truth that I was too blinded to see.”

“What do you mean?”

“My father.”

“Your father was a complicated man,” Rashid said diplomatically. “He wasn’t wrong to strive for peace.”

“He wasn’t,” Quatre agreed. “But it’s easy to extoll the virtues of total pacifism when you’re someone like Relena Darlian or my father. Or me. People who have the resources to escape war aren’t the ones whose lives are being destroyed, and no one forces us into battle.”

“Treize Khushrenada could have spent the rest of the war in his castle in Luxembourg if he wanted to,” Rashid offered in support, nodding his giant head.

Quatre nodded. “Right. My father was the same. He never had to be in the line of fire.”

Both of them knew that Zayeed Winner had stood in the crosshairs and paid the price, but Rashid was the one who said it out loud. “He put himself there.”

“He did.” Quatre gave another curt nod. “My father thought he could stand aside and say that he was above it all and knew better than everyone who was fighting, and he’d gotten away with it until then. He said he didn't care if OZ killed him if he was taking himself out of the war and standing up for what he believed in.”

“That did happen,” Rashid offered.

Quatre nodded. “But did he mean it? Maybe he didn’t really think anyone would fire colony beam cannons on an active resource satellite, let alone one with Zayeed Winner on board.”

“It’s not a completely outlandish idea,” Rashid conceded. “Your father was a very important man.”

“But _how_ was he important?” Quatre pressed. “For having money? Money his ancestors got because they came out to space and found some giant rocks and said that the rocks were theirs.”

“You’ll hear no argument from me on this,” Rashid said mildly.

“This is the truth I couldn’t see when I was fifteen,” Quatre said, with the air of a revelation. “Maybe they fired on that satellite _because_ Zayeed Winner was on board.”

“Ah.” Rashid put down his cup. At some point over the conversation, he’d finished his coffee, leaving only a streak of ground dregs smeared against the pale porcelain.

“The workers wanted to fight,” Quatre said, perhaps belaboring the point. Rashid knew workers better than he did. “Their options were fighting for OZ or going back to the mines to make money for the Winners, and they chose fighting.”

What neither of them had to say: Zayeed’s stand on pacifism had been easy for most of his life and cost him nothing, until the end, and in the end, he paid the price for nothing. If he’d made his stand on something he could actually change, like making L4 a more equitable place to live, he’d have paid for it every day from the moment he inherited his company shares to the end of his life. But if he’d cared to meet the needs of his employees, his life might not have ended the same way. His employees might not have thought OZ was the answer. They might have seen Zayeed as on their side. It had taken Quatre two years to understand this.

“I wanted to tell you,” Rashid said regretfully. “But I didn’t try hard enough.”

“It’s alright,” Quatre reassured him. “I don’t know if I would have heard it. You know what happened after that.”

Rashid nodded, solemn.

“This is why I want it to be you in that corner office,” Quatre said. “Nobody else they’re considering understands how the workers feel or why someone might feel like they have no real choice but to fight.”

“Even if you can get the votes to appoint me, it won’t be easy after that.”

“No,” Quatre agreed. “But I trust you. The lifeblood of the company—the workers, not the shareholders—they will trust you.”

“I’ll have to learn how to lead in the boardroom, as opposed to the battlefield.”

“So will I,” Quatre said. “Please tell me you’ll at least think about it.”

Rashid reached across the table and took Quatre’s hands between his two, huge palms. “I’ll think about it,” he promised.

* * *

> Q. I am handing you a file. I think we have this marked as Exhibit Number 1. Please take a look at it, and let me know when you’ve had a chance to look. I have a copy for the court reporter as well.
> 
> (Whereupon Plaintiffs' Exhibit No. 1 was marked for identification.)
> 
> BY MR. FORD:
> 
> Q. Do you know what this is?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. Have you seen it before?
> 
> A. Not in this exact formatting, but -- yes.
> 
> Q. What is it, to your knowledge?
> 
> A. It's a year-over-year comparison of Winner Corp earnings since my father died.
> 
> Q. And can you describe the trend in the earnings in the years since your father died?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. And how would you describe them?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. The document speaks for itself. You can answer, Quatre, but I just want this noted for the record.
> 
> A. Alright. The earnings are trending -- lower. On net, anyway.
> 
> Q. And why do you think that is?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Calls for speculation or a legal conclusion.
> 
> Q. Withdrawn. Can you tell me what numbers have gone up?
> 
> A. Employee payroll. That's much higher. Charitable donations. Infrastructure spending. Should I go on?
> 
> Q. No. Thank you. Mr. Winner, I'm handing you another document. This one, we have marked as Exhibit Number 2.
> 
> (Whereupon Plaintiffs' Exhibit No. 2 was marked for identification.)
> 
> BY MR. FORD:
> 
> Q. Do you know what this is, Mr. Winner?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. Have you seen it before?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. What is it?
> 
> A. This document includes the projected and final budgets for the L3-X18999 project.
> 
> Q. How would you compare these two budgets?
> 
> A. I'm sorry. What do you mean?
> 
> Q. Compared to the projected budget, what is the final?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Document speaks for itself.
> 
> A. Well, the final budget is higher. But that’s not unusual for an infrastructure project of this scale.
> 
> Q. I didn't ask your opinion on whether this was usual or not.
> 
> A. Respectfully, sir, it's just not an opinion. It's a fact in this industry that unforeseen circumstances often --
> 
> Q. Mr. Winner, please. Let's stick to the questions. Could you read for me the date of the projected budget?
> 
> A. This one is dated March 15, A.C. 197.
> 
> Q. How old were you in A.C. 197, Mr. Winner?
> 
> A. Seventeen.
> 
> Q. What was your involvement in the X-18999 project?
> 
> A. You mean when I was seventeen?
> 
> Q. Generally.
> 
> A. I ask because my role changed over the years. This was a multi-year project with contributions from across the Winner organization, and my role in the company was changing at the time too.
> 
> Q. Alright. So let's start with what your role was when the project began in A.C. 197. Do you know how Winner Corp became involved with colony X-18999?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. And how did that happen?
> 
> A. It was my idea.
> 
> Q. But you just said that you weren't on the board before you were eighteen. So how did you get the board to move on this project when you weren't a member?
> 
> A. I know many of the directors in a personal capacity. They're like uncles and aunties -- I've known them all my life. So I approached them first.
> 
> Q. But don't the articles of incorporation require a majority of the directors be independent outsiders?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Leading the witness. Calls for a legal conclusion.
> 
> A. And you didn't let me finish. Of course I didn't go to a majority of the members. Most of them, I don't know personally. But I approached ones that I did know, and they must have brought the idea forward at a meeting and convinced the others to agree.
> 
> Q. Were you at these meetings?
> 
> A. No.
> 
> Q. Did you review the minutes for these meetings?
> 
> A. No. Or, well. I don't know. Maybe. When I joined the board of directors, I went over many of the prior meeting minutes to get an idea of how everything worked. These meetings might have been some of them, but they weren't anything I necessarily looked at specifically.
> 
> Q. Let me make sure I understand what you’re saying. Would you agree that, to the best of your knowledge, Winner Corp had not been involved with colony X-18999 prior to A.C. 197?
> 
> A. Yes. I would say that's accurate.
> 
> Q. Who funded the establishment of colony X-18999?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Relevance. Where is this going?
> 
> FORD: We're clarifying the chain of investment in the colony. This provides context for Winner Corp's later involvement.
> 
> RAJAB: Quatre can answer, but going back to A.C. 188 is beyond the scope of this deposition and beyond his personal knowledge. Asking him to testify to this could be hearsay.
> 
> A. Alright. Um. The Barton Foundation provided the seed capital for the X-18999 colony construction. I'm not sure what hearsay is, but it's true that I was only eight or nine years old at the time. I only learned about this after the fact.
> 
> Q. Do you know why the Barton Foundation discontinued funds for the X-18999 colony construction?
> 
> RAJAB: I renew my hearsay objection.
> 
> A. Right. Like I said, I don't know any specifics, but as I understand it, the White Fang led a riot on the colony, and they discontinued construction after that.
> 
> Q. Do you think it's possible that the Barton Foundation discontinued funding the project for business reasons?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Calls for speculation.
> 
> A. I don't know.
> 
> Q. But would you agree that it's possible that Winner Corp spent billions of dollars taking on a project that was already known to be an expensive failure?
> 
> A. Anything is possible, sir. Like I said, I don't know.
> 
> Q. Thank you, Mr. Winner. Let's switch gears. Are you familiar with a man named Rashid Kurama?
> 
> A. Yes, of course.
> 
> Q. And what is your relationship with Mr. Kurama?
> 
> A. He's the CEO of the company. I'm head of the board. Of course, we interact frequently. He's also a personal friend.
> 
> Q. What was Mr. Kurama's job title before he became CEO?
> 
> A. I don't remember exactly. Something like -- I don't know. Senior project manager? He was in charge of the X-18999 reconstruction project.
> 
> Q. The project that we've just established was a resource sinkhole.
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Form of a question.
> 
> Q. Withdrawn. Do you know if Mr. Kurama had any senior-level executive experience before becoming CEO?
> 
> A. No. I don't believe he did.
> 
> Q. How long have you known Mr. Kurama?
> 
> A. I think since I was -- since I was thirteen or so?
> 
> Q. You think? You’re not sure?
> 
> A. No, I'm sure. It was AC 193. I was thirteen.
> 
> Q. And how did you meet Mr. Kurama?
> 
> A. He was involved in a labor dispute that involved some former Winner Corp employees.
> 
> Q. Was Mr. Kurama an employee of Winner Corp or one of its subsidiaries at the time?
> 
> A. I don't -- no. He wasn't.
> 
> Q. Was Mr. Kurama employed by a labor union providing services to Winner Corp employees?
> 
> A. I don't know. I don't think so.
> 
> Q. You don't think so?
> 
> A. No. No, there was never a Winner employee union before I took over -- I mean, before I took the employees’ requests to unionize seriously. So there wouldn't have been, not at the time.
> 
> Q. Okay. So do you know what Mr. Kurama's official employment was at the time you met him?
> 
> A. No.
> 
> Q. Have you ever seen Mr. Kurama's resume?
> 
> A. I don't think so, no.
> 
> Q. You appointed Mr. Kurama to the position of CEO without having seen his resume?
> 
> A. Well, I'm aware of his accomplishments, and his later work for the company was the most important thing.
> 
> Q. Would it surprise you if I told you that he was working as a freelance mercenary in A.C. 193, when you met him, and until he first took a position at Winner Corp?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Leading the witness. This kind of questioning is more appropriate for a cross.
> 
> FORD: I'm only asking Mr. Winner for his reaction to a fact.
> 
> A. No. I wouldn't be surprised.
> 
> Q. Was it normal for you to be involved in Winner Corp labor disputes at age thirteen?
> 
> A. No. But this wasn't a normal situation. It wasn't really a Winner Corp dispute. They weren't Winner Corp employees, not at the time, as far as I'm aware. Some of them had been, and we hired some in the future, but it wasn't -- the company wasn’t directly involved.
> 
> Q. What do you mean, not a normal situation?
> 
> A. It was the liberation of MO-III.
> 
> Q. When you say "liberation," what do you mean by that?
> 
> A. I mean, the satellite was under UESA -- Alliance -- control at the time, and there were some people who thought that the resources more properly belonged to the colonies.
> 
> Q. "Some people" meaning whom, exactly?
> 
> A. Mr. Kurama, to start. And I suppose I did as well.
> 
> Q. Was colonial independence part of Winner Corp policy at the time?
> 
> A. Not as far as I know. I was thirteen.
> 
> Q. Has it ever been?
> 
> A. Not since I've been involved. We only ever worked with the ESUN. They're very different from the Alliance.
> 
> Q. Going back to this incident on MO-III, how did you get to the asteroid?
> 
> A. I was kidnapped and brought there.
> 
> Q. By whom?
> 
> A. By mercenaries.
> 
> Q. Which mercenaries?
> 
> A. They called themselves the Maganac Corps.
> 
> Q. Do you know who hired the Maganac Corps to kidnap you?
> 
> A. No.
> 
> Q. And are these the same Maganac Corps that Rashid Kurama was the leader of prior to joining the Winner organization?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. Do you know if Mr. Kurama was involved with the Maganac Corps after you hired him?
> 
> A. I didn't hire him.
> 
> Q. Withdrawn. Do you know if Mr. Kurama was involved with the Maganac Corps after he joined Winner Corp?
> 
> A. I suppose that depends what you mean.
> 
> Q. What do you mean by that?
> 
> A. The Maganac Corps, they're not just some company of soldiers. They're his friends. My friends. Joining a company doesn't mean you leave behind your friends.

* * *

When they were in zero-g on the Peacemillion, Howard said that they should strap themselves into the bunks before going to sleep at night to keep from floating off, but when he was with Trowa, Quatre felt like he didn’t need a tether. He couldn’t pinpoint just what it was that made Trowa so firm and grounding. Maybe it was because, as far as Quatre was concerned, Trowa was invincible. He was formidable in any mobile suit, even after running out of bullets, and he had died and come back to life without a scratch on his body. Or maybe the reason Trowa felt so solid was because, unlike almost everyone Quatre knew, he been born out of a womb and into full Earth gravity. Colonial babies didn't feel their weight the same way, not when they gestated in test tubes in low-gravity labs. Earth-born Trowa had to be strong to protect himself from day one, and his first breaths had been full of fortifying Earth air. The Earth’s rich oxygen was in his blood.

When he was curled against Trowa’s side, his head resting on Trowa’s shoulder, Quatre couldn’t decide if he wanted to be closer because he wanted to be near that strength or if what he really wanted was to feel the rise and fall of his chest, each breath a confirmation that, despite everything Quatre had put him through, Trowa was alive. When he crushed their mouths together, it felt like the sliver of air between them—the canned, recycled oxygen of a spaceship—was as pure and sweet as the first breath Quatre had taken on the surface of the planet, months before. All that mattered, in that last stretch of the first war, was that Trowa somehow found some solace in what they were doing, too. That despite what Quatre had done to him, Trowa still wanted to be close to him. Quatre knew, deep down in his bones, that he would never truly grapple with what it meant to have come so close to killing someone he cared about so much, but told himself that if he lived past the next few weeks, he would at least deal with what it meant that it was so natural and obvious that he should seek out comfort in the arms of another boy. Even then, he knew he was putting off confronting what he’d always known.

But even if Quatre had always known it would always be a boy, he hadn’t always known _Trowa_. He wasn’t sure if he always would. For all the solidity of his muscular shoulders, there was a part of Trowa that was lighter than air, no matter the gravity. He made it look so easy when he tumbled into and out of fights, landing catlike on his feet every time. No one could touch him. Just as easily, he could slip through Quatre’s fingers like water. He’d already done it before.

“What happens when this is over?” Quatre asked one night. “Are you even still going to be Trowa Barton?”

“I don’t know,” Trowa admitted. Even in this intimate space, murmuring his words directly into the shell of Quatre’s ear, his voice was even and aloof. “I’ve never been Trowa Barton. That’s just what I let people call me.”

So much of Quatre’s life had been tied up in what his name meant. He couldn’t imagine having a name that didn’t mean anything. He couldn’t imagine himself without a name. “Do you like being called Trowa?” he asked.

“It’s a name,” Trowa said. “No better and no worse than any other.”

“So it doesn’t make a difference to you?”

“I didn’t say that. A name is a name, but.” He paused, and even though his voice never wavered, Quatre could feel his uncertainty about what to say next, about what it meant that he would say it. “This is the first name that I ever thought could become mine. It’s the first one I remember being called by people who care about me.”

“Like Catherine,” Quatre suggested. He was afraid to suggest himself as one of those people. Even when he was so close to Trowa that he could have leaned in to kiss his neck, this connection between them felt so fragile and ephemeral that trying to give it weight or even acknowledging it out loud would cause it to dissipate into nothing like smoke.

“And you, I’d hoped,” Trowa said simply. “And Heero, Duo, and Wufei.”

Quatre’s heart rose and fell, and he knew it was because he wanted to mean more than the other pilots. He breathed in the scent of Trowa’s jumpsuit. He wasn’t under any illusion that it smelled of anything but sweat and grease and the industrial-grade detergent in the ship’s laundry, but he knew he'd remember the scent fondly forever, a small joy from the midst of war. “I do care about you,” he confirmed. “To me, you’re Trowa, and I don’t know if I can think of you any other way.”

“You can keep thinking of me as Trowa, if you want to.”

Quatre snaked a hand up Trowa’s chest, trailing his fingers until they cupped his cheek. He turned Trowa’s head until they faced each other. This close, he could see both green eyes, past the hair that so often hid half his face. “And can I keep thinking of you like this?”

It was a long moment before Trowa responded. His eyebrows wrinkled as he looked at Quatre with an expression that could only be confusion. “Do you mean you want to be together after the war?”

“Yes?” Quatre answered, tentative. Neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ seemed right.

“Oh.”

“Do you not?”

Trowa looked away from him then, to the bottom of the bunk above them. Despite how small the cots were, they’d never used the separate beds and had shared ever since coming aboard Peacemillion. Quatre could never be sure if Howard and Noin knew.

“It was never a possibility to me,” Trowa said. “It’s not you. It’s just that I never expected to survive after the war. I’m not like you. I don’t have a life to go back to.”

To a boy who’d been given a purpose long before he was even born, it seemed like such a romantic way to live, one moment to the next, with no pressures or responsibilities. Quatre imagined leaving everything behind and joining Trowa on the road, living as a nomad. His ancestors had been nomads, once, wandering the desert for generations. Quatre could do it again. But the notion was fleeting, and he didn’t voice it. What he said instead was, “You could come be a part of my life.”

“Could I?” Trowa asked, rhetorical.

Quatre’s chest felt tight, like he was suddenly all too aware of the stale, artificial air around them. It was the awareness that Trowa was right.

Trowa didn’t make him respond or argue the point. He stroked the back of Quatre’s hair in a way that made him shiver and burrow closer, his nose pressed to Trowa’s collar.

“There’s no place for someone like me in your life,” Trowa said softly. His long fingers didn’t leave the back of Quatre’s scalp. “Outside of this ship, outside of our Gundams, the only place my world overlaps with your world is if you’re at a dinner where there are more forks at each plate than I have ever owned, and I’m on staff.”

“Or infiltrating the staff,” Quatre teased. A part of him thought maybe the conversation would get easier if he joked. It seemed like something he might have picked up from talking to Duo.

“Or infiltrating the staff,” Trowa conceded. “How do you explain to anybody how you know me? Who’s going to know you were a Gundam pilot? We can't say we met in the war. I didn’t go to school in Sanc with you like Heero did. I’ve never even been to a real school. What happens when I can’t fit in with your friends? What happens when you realize I don’t care about money or business, and I don’t know how to act around the people who do, and you get bored and frustrated with me?”

It was flattering, in a way, to realize, listening, that _Trowa_ was the one who thought he was out of his depth, when Quatre was sure he’d never again meet anyone as brave as Trowa, or as wise, as talented, as intelligent (if not intelligent enough to perceive that, before Project Meteor, the Maganac Corps had been Quatre’s only real friends, and they would have no problem with a nameless mercenary acrobat). It even made Quatre feel warm inside just to realize that, regardless of the conclusion, Trowa had clearly spent time thinking of him and considering what it would be like to be together. But that was how Trowa was. He thought over everything, and all his feelings were at an analytical remove. Before that moment, it had never been more obvious than when Quatre had first kissed him, and he froze and seemed to weigh all of the pros and cons in his mind before kissing back.

“I couldn’t get frustrated with you,” Quatre murmured. He liked how thoughtful and deliberate Trowa was. It had saved his life once, not so long ago, if at great cost. “I was only frustrated when I thought I’d lost you.”

“You’ve only ever known me at war,” Trowa said. “We’re the same here. We both made our place on the battlefield. We each have something that we do here, something only we can do. But outside, you’re the Winner heir, and I’m a clown. Literally. I can’t just sit around and play the flute while you go to important meetings.”

Quatre balled his fist in the fabric of Trowa’s jumpsuit. “So this is it? This is all we have?”

“I don’t know,” Trowa said. “Maybe. Or maybe someday, when I’m better at being a person, and you have the power to make room in your life for people that don’t fit what’s expected, it’ll be the right time, and we’ll fit together then. You’ll always be you, and maybe I’ll still be someone you could care about. Maybe I’ll even still be called Trowa Barton. But I don’t know.”

“I’ll always care,” Quatre said breathlessly. “I’ll wait for you.”

“You don’t have to do that.” Trowa seemed almost disappointed. “If you found someone else, I would understand.”

It was so kind and so chivalrous that Quatre decided he would have preferred that he wouldn’t understand. He wanted Trowa to be jealous of him and his hypothetical future lover. He slipped his hand under the collar of Trowa’s jumpsuit, pressing his palm against the thin fabric of his undershirt, feeling his warm chest underneath, his Earth-strong heart beating inside. “But for now,” he said. “For now, it’s me and you, and it doesn’t matter what we call each other. We’re Gundam pilots Zero-Three and Zero-Four, and it can be just like this.”

After becoming a Gundam pilot, after falling to Earth in a shooting star, after finding someone he cared about back from the dead, kissing Trowa was the most exhilarating thing that Quatre had ever done. He leaned up and did it again, pressing his lips against Trowa’s, hard, and this time Trowa didn’t stop to think before kissing back. They still weren’t very good at it, but they kept going even after Quatre’s teeth grazed against the space-dry crack in Trowa’s lip, and he could taste the sharp iron and oxygen of blood.

* * *

> Q. Earlier, you said you were President and Executive Director of the Winner Foundation, correct?
> 
> A. That's correct.
> 
> Q. And what kind of duties do those roles entail?
> 
> A. It's a high-level, mission-focused sort of role. I'm involved in crafting the directives and messaging, and I do a lot of work in the relationship-building space, mainly with government officials and NGOs, private philanthropists, and other strategic partners.
> 
> Q. Are you at all involved in the grant approval process?
> 
> A. For -- I'm sorry, which grant program do you mean?
> 
> Q. Programs, actually. Are you involved in grants to education or the arts?
> 
> A. Not typically. Every so often, one gets escalated to my desk.
> 
> Q. But you are aware of them, correct?
> 
> A. Well, yes, I suppose.
> 
> Q. I am handing you another file. This one, we have marked as Exhibit Number 3.
> 
> (Whereupon Plaintiffs' Exhibit No. 3 was marked for identification.)
> 
> BY MR. FORD:
> 
> Q. Do you know what this is?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. Have you seen it before?
> 
> A. Not with these highlights, but yes.
> 
> Q. We'll get to the highlights, Mr. Winner. Can you tell me what this is?
> 
> A. It's a summary of charitable grants made by the Winner Foundation in the past fiscal year.
> 
> Q. Thank you. So the first highlighted item. Do you see that?
> 
> RAJAB: Same objection I had last time you asked my client to read exhibits into the deposition record.
> 
> A. I see it.
> 
> Q. What is it?
> 
> A. Do I still answer?
> 
> Q. Yes. We will resolve these objections with the Court later. But you have to respond now, and if the Court sustains the objection, we can strike your testimony.
> 
> A. Okay. This first item is a donation to the Peacecraft School.
> 
> Q. And what is your relationship to the Peacecraft School?
> 
> A. I was a student there, briefly.
> 
> Q. Did you have any influence over the selection of the Peacecraft School for a charitable grant?
> 
> A. I may have suggested it for consideration, but I didn't influence the process. The team at the Foundation would have approved it independently.
> 
> Q. And what about the highlighted item on the next page?
> 
> A. The partnership with St. Jerome's Church?
> 
> Q. Yes.
> 
> A. That one is the same. Actually, I know I brought that one to their attention. But again, St. Jerome’s would have gone through the full approval process.
> 
> Q. How did you decide to include St. Jerome's as a charity partner?
> 
> A. Again, this is like the school. It wasn't just my decision.
> 
> Q. Can you describe the nature of your partnership with St. Jerome's?
> 
> A. Of course. The Winner Foundation partnership is based on support for St. Jerome’s educational and therapeutic programs for children -- it started with orphans of the Eve Wars, but they're all teenagers by now. They run a home too. They own the building, and they set the agenda for their programming, but Winner helps maintain the facilities and provides equipment and operational support. They're a Catholic organization, of course, but the project is entirely secular.
> 
> Q. Does this ever include cash support directly to the organization?
> 
> A. I couldn't say off the top of my head. If it does, it’s in service of mission-focused procurement. The expenses would all be documented.
> 
> Q. And what is your personal involvement in the project?
> 
> A. I manage the relationship and I make sure that we’re staying on-mission at a higher level.
> 
> Q. Who is your primary contact?
> 
> A. The head of the orphans' program. His name is Duo Maxwell.
> 
> Q. Did you know Mr. Maxwell before this partnership began?
> 
> A. Father Maxwell now, actually. He was just ordained this past year.
> 
> Q. Father Maxwell, apologies. Did you know Father Maxwell before this partnership began?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Where is this going?
> 
> FORD: All of these questions relate to the personal use of Foundation monies.
> 
> THE WITNESS: Everything about the St. Jerome's relationship is completely above-board. We've provided you with all of the paperwork. You can see for yourself.
> 
> BY MR. FORD:
> 
> Q. Please answer the question. How did you meet Father Maxwell?
> 
> A. That wasn't the question.
> 
> Q. Fine. Did you know Father Maxwell before the Winner Foundation’s partnership with St. Jerome's began?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. Now, how did you meet Father Maxwell?
> 
> A. We met during the war. He happened to be a friend of a friend. Do you know how that is?
> 
> Q. Who was your mutual friend?
> 
> A. Relena Darlian. "Peacecraft" at the time, of course. I believe Duo had gone to school with her before she went back to the Sanc Kingdom. In Japan, I want to say.
> 
> Q. I did some digging into Mr. -- sorry, Father Maxwell's background. His official biography on the St. Jerome’s Catholic Church website says that he grew up poor in an orphanage on L2-V08744, and yet by the time he was a teenager, he was attending boarding school with Relena Darlian on Earth. Is that right?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Relevance. Factual basis. You're asking my client about someone else’s background. 
> 
> A. I can't say what happened in the intervening years, but I can confirm that I met Duo Maxwell on Earth when we were teenagers. I'm sure there are records in whatever school he apparently went to.
> 
> RAJAB: Though we will object to the extent that discovery in this case becomes harassment of uninvolved third parties.
> 
> Q. Understood. Thank you. That’s the extent of our questioning about Father Maxwell specifically. Does Ms. Darlian know about the Winner-St. Jerome’s partnership?
> 
> A. I can't exactly testify to what someone else does or doesn't know. But I'm sure it's come up socially. I don't think Duo would keep it a secret.
> 
> Q. Does she know the level of the Winner Foundation’s financial commitment to the partnership?
> 
> A. I'm sure Relena has much better things to worry about.
> 
> Q. Is that a "no," Mr. Winner?
> 
> A. It’s an "I don’t know."
> 
> Q. Do you think Ms. Darlian has a favorable opinion of this partnership?
> 
> A. Do I what? Why? Are you suggesting that I'm laundering bribes to the Vice Foreign Minister through a dirty priest in L2?
> 
> Q. I'm not suggesting anything, Mr. Winner, but it's interesting your mind went there. Would you like to elaborate on why someone might think that?
> 
> A. No, thank you.
> 
> RAJAB: And I object to any question requesting that my client speculate on the mental state of third parties not present. If you want to know what Vice Foreign Minister Relena Darlian thinks about my client's performance of his corporate fiduciary duties, you're welcome to subpoena her directly. We'd be happy to litigate that.
> 
> Q. Very well. Withdrawn. There's one more donation that I'd like to bring to your attention. Do you see the third highlighted item?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. What is it?
> 
> A. The arts grant to -- oh, that wasn't very much money!
> 
> Q. I wasn't asking about how much money it was, Mr. Winner. For the record, we are looking at the line in Exhibit Number 4 labeled "Cirque Soyuz." Are you familiar with this item?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. And what is it?
> 
> A. I already said. It's an arts grant. One of many that we make regularly.
> 
> Q. Has the Winner Foundation ever made a grant to a circus before?
> 
> A. Cirque Soyuz is just one of -- it's a longstanding cultural institution. Just because we've never donated to a circus before --
> 
> Q. Yes or no, please, Mr. Winner.
> 
> A. No.
> 
> Q. Are you personally involved with Cirque Soyuz?
> 
> A. What do you mean, "personally involved"?
> 
> Q. Do you know any of the performers?
> 
> A. I don't see how that's relevant.
> 
> Q. Your personal use of Winner Corporation funds is very relevant. Please answer the question, Mr. Winner. Do you know any of the performers of Cirque Soyuz?
> 
> A. Yes.
> 
> Q. Do you know who they are?
> 
> A. Catherine Bloom.
> 
> Q. Anyone else?
> 
> A. No current performers.
> 
> Q. But do you know any former performers?
> 
> A. I’m close with a former performer, yes.
> 
> Q. What is his name?
> 
> A. Trowa Bloom.
> 
> Q. What does he do now?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Relevance.
> 
> A. Well, freelance work, mostly. He takes some classes. Art. I’m not sure what this has to do with anything either.
> 
> Q. These questions are about your use of funds, Mr. Winner. Was Mr. Bloom still with Cirque Soyuz at any time when they received grant money?
> 
> A. Yes. He was with the circus at the time they first received the grant, and his sister still performs there. But the circus is the only place any company money went. We’ve never hired him for anything.
> 
> Q. And I presume Ms. Catherine Bloom is the sister, correct?
> 
> A. Correct.
> 
> Q. When you say "close," what is the nature of your relationship with Mr. Bloom?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Mr. Winner has already stated that he has a personal relationship with a former Cirque Soyuz performer, and a personal relationship alone isn’t enough to rebut the presumption of impartiality. Any further questioning on this point would be duplicative at best. At worst, it's harassment, or an attempt to prejudice my client --
> 
> A. Terza, it's alright. They wouldn't be asking if they didn't already know. I might as well just say it. Yes, Trowa Bloom is my boyfriend.

* * *

When the Belgian ESUN driver told him that they were waiting for a second pilot to shuttle to the hotel, Quatre could narrow the mystery guest down to one of two options. He was sure that Duo would tell him in advance if he knew they would be in the same city at the same time, and he liked to think that Trowa would too. That left only Heero, who kept his whereabouts on a need-to-know basis, and Wufei, who seemed to believe that nobody was ever need-to-know.

It wasn’t long before Heero Yuy strode up to the ESUN van, carrying only a tattered backpack, slung over one shoulder. There probably wasn’t much more in it than a change of underwear and a toothbrush. Heero was even wearing that horrendous green tank top. By comparison, Quatre felt ludicrously over-packed, with a checked bag, a carry-on, and Auda and Abdul crammed into the backseat behind him.

“It had to be Yuy. Called it,” said Abdul. In the rearview mirror, Quatre could see a glint of triumph shimmering from behind Abdul’s dark glasses, and Auda slipped a bill of some kind of Earth currency into his hands.

Heero climbed wordlessly into the van, only acknowledging Quatre with a brief moment of eye contact and a utilitarian nod before buckling himself into the seat next to him. It seemed his time with Relena hadn’t made Heero any more partial to small talk, and Quatre didn’t want to discuss anything deeper in front of two Maganacs and an ESUN driver, which meant that they passed the drive to the hotel in near silence.

When they arrived, Auda and Abdul slipped into bodyguard mode, blending into the tableau of travelers milling about the lobby. Heero, having been handed a card key without any need to check in, headed straight for the elevator bank.

Quatre followed him.

“Heero, wait!”

Heero stopped and turned to look at him, that familiar blank look on his face. Quatre wasn’t sure he would have been more or less surprised if he hadn’t waited.

Knowing that he could speak without needing to hear Heero give him permission, Quatre blurted out his question. “What are you going to say to them about the ZERO System?”

“Whatever they ask me,” Heero said plainly. Quatre knew he shouldn’t have expected any different. The war was over, but Heero was still the perfect soldier, and testimony was only his latest mission.

“What if they just ask you to describe it?” Quatre probed. “What then?”

Heero let out a grunt of acknowledgement rather than answer immediately. When the next elevator _dinged_ to announce its arrival, Heero went straight to it, gesturing at Quatre to follow. “Come on,” he said.

Inside the elevator, Heero let the doors close and, after passing only a few floors, pressed the red button to stop their ascent.

“I’ll tell them what it does,” Heero said, picking up their conversation as smoothly as though there hadn’t been any pause at all.

“What it does is different for everyone, I think,” Quatre said. “It restored Trowa’s memories. It showed Duo what he feared. It gave Wufei permission to fight the ones he wanted to fight. But for me…”

Heero saved him from having to complete the thought. “It showed me my enemies,” he said. “My _real_ enemies. And it showed me how I could defeat them.”

“Do you think it showed you?” Quatre asked, because it was something he’d wondered, himself. Maybe ZERO had shown Heero his real enemies, but Colony 06E3 had never been a true threat to Quatre. “Or do you think it just pulled it out of your mind?”

“Does it matter?”

Quatre was quiet for a moment. He could feel the presence of someone gathering on the first floor, wondering about the elevator whose light had stopped. Maybe Heero, who had shown such an aptitude for the ZERO System, had taken ZERO’s lessons to heart and gamed out the possibilities for what could happen to them next, how long they could talk, how long before a technician pried open the elevator doors with a crowbar.

“No,” he said eventually. “It doesn’t matter if ZERO accepted my idea of what made someone my enemy, or if it told me based on the parameters that its programmer gave it. I listened to it, and it was wrong, but I attacked anyway. I killed so many people. I ruined so many lives. I thought I killed Trowa, and he should never have been my enemy. I never mastered it. Not like you did.”

“You could have,” Heero said simply.

“Is that why you made me use it? You thought I could master it?”

Heero shrugged. “The ZERO System is a tool,” he explained. “Any tool can be dangerous if you don’t know how to use it. That doesn’t mean we need to be afraid of it. You were afraid, but we were fighting a war, and we needed to use all the tools at our disposal.”

“I’m sorry I took it out then,” Quatre said, even though he wasn’t really sorry. “Maybe we could have ended the war sooner if I hadn’t been so weak, and I could use the ZERO System like you.”

Heero’s eyes went wide at Quatre’s accusing tone. “I never said you were weak.”

Quatre had never seen him look so innocent and hurt. He reached out, but, unsure if the contact would be welcome, he left his hand floating over Heero’s shoulder. “Heero…”

“I used ZERO because I needed the tool,” Heero said. “You’re the better soldier. You proved you didn’t need it.”

“That’s not true. You’re such a good solider. You could’ve fought without it. I couldn’t beat Dorothy when she was using the ZERO System, and she stabbed me.”

Heero reached up to grab Quatre’s wrist where it still hovered by his shoulder. Even though the gesture felt intimate and gentle, the posture was the same as if Heero had blocked a strike. “You let Dorothy stab you because you have a good heart,” he said, matter of fact. “Trowa told me everything.”

“You have a good heart too, Heero,” Quatre responded, pleading. Until that moment, it hadn’t mattered whether Heero believed him, but suddenly, it was vitally important that he did. Quatre knew without being told that Heero had not heard those words nearly enough. It was an odd thing to say to a boy who had once vowed to kill him, but that was in the past, and Quatre had deserved it, at the time. Only someone with a good heart could be so kind to someone like Quatre, after all that.

Shaking his head, Heero let go of Quatre’s wrist. “No,” he said. “If I did, I wouldn’t be jealous of you. You’ve killed more of your enemies, and you didn’t even want to do it. And the battlefield isn’t the only place you can fight. You’re like Relena. You’re not just a soldier. You still matter in a time of peace.”

Before Quatre could respond, to tell Heero that he was wrong, Heero released the elevator, and they resumed their slow crawl up the floors of the hotel. The doors opened, a group of guests filed in, and the conversation was over.

* * *

> Q. Just a few more questions. Mr. Winner, have you ever done business with any former Gundam pilots?
> 
> A. What do you mean, "done business with"?
> 
> Q. Have you ever interacted with a former Gundam pilot in your capacity as a fiduciary of Winner Corp?
> 
> MS. RAJAB: Mr. Ford. I fail to see how this is relevant, or, for that matter, how my client is supposed to know who is and isn’t a former Gundam pilot.
> 
> A. I suppose it's possible I did, though. I interact with a lot of people, including a lot of former soldiers. But most people are, around my age.
> 
> WAHED: It's true. I enlisted in OZ at age fifteen.
> 
> Q. Were you a Gundam pilot, Mr. Winner?
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Relevance? I'd like to strike the question. I don't see what some conspiracy theory about Gundam pilots has to do with the matter at hand, and this has the potential to be hugely prejudicial to my client.
> 
> FORD: Winner Corp assets were used in the production of at least two Gundams circa A.C. 195. We all know how expensive gundanium alloy is. Under the corporate bylaws, that kind of expenditure requires board or shareholder authorization. Now if you're saying that there's board minutes approving Gundam production that you failed to disclose in discovery --
> 
> RAJAB: I'm not.
> 
> FORD: So if you're not saying it, then you are acknowledging that there was a misuse of corporate assets that is still unaccounted for.
> 
> RAJAB: My client was fifteen. He wasn't on the board when the gundanium went missing.
> 
> FORD: When someone misappropriated the gundanium.
> 
> RAJAB: Fine.
> 
> FORD: And he was the majority shareholder by the time a Winner Corp facility was used to build the Gundam designated as Wing Zero. Mr. Winner owed a duty to the company --
> 
> RAJAB: To not approve a request that was never submitted to him?
> 
> FORD: Not to misuse corporate assets himself! There is reason to believe that whoever used the Winner Corp facilities to build the Gundams may have been a pilot or working directly with the pilots, and there is only one person who is in the right age range and would have had the ability to access the facilities.
> 
> RAJAB: So you're saying my client -- you're saying Quatre Raberba Winner, the Quatre Raberba Winner, was a Gundam pilot, and that's somehow relevant to our corporate governance litigation? I'm sure you can see how this is attenuated.
> 
> THE WITNESS: Could we please go off the record?
> 
> BY MR. FORD:
> 
> Q. We established ground rules at the beginning of this deposition. Can you answer the question first?
> 
> RAJAB: Why should he answer the question? This is absurd. You still haven't established a foundation. If the issue is corporate assets, then why are you starting with if he was a pilot? Quatre --
> 
> A. Stop. I'm -- I'm sorry, Terza. I really am.
> 
> RAJAB: Quatre? What do you mean? You don't have to apologize.
> 
> A. I do. I can answer. My father was the one who first gave refuge to Instructor H during the war, and he built Sandrock without my father’s permission, but I knew about it. After my father died, I used my father's test lab and Winner Corp gundanium to build Wing Zero, and when it was done, I --
> 
> RAJAB: You don't have to go on. You've answered enough.
> 
> A. Thanks. Thank you, Terza.
> 
> Q. He hasn't finished his answer. If the witness is willing to elaborate, then by all means --
> 
> RAJAB: Objection. Harassing the witness. Mr. Winner has answered the question, to the extent it relates to use of corporate assets. And I will be moving to seal Mr. Winner's testimony and redact the transcript to the extent that it relates to whether or not he was a Gundam pilot. It was beyond the scope of this deposition from the start, and the connection is so attenuated that I can only conclude the question was included to insinuate a threat of blackmail to Mr. Winner and coerce him into a settlement. We will also be looking into the possibility of ESUN penalties for soliciting disclosure of confidential information.
> 
> FORD: I haven’t mentioned a settlement, but if you want to talk about it, we can certainly schedule a time.
> 
> RAJAB: Not now. Are you finished?
> 
> FORD: Yes. No further questions.

* * *

Quatre blinked as he stepped out of the building. The artificial colony light wasn’t as harsh as being on Earth, especially in the desert, when he’d step outside and have to shield his face against the sun’s unfiltered barrage, but even so, it was blinding after hours in a dim office. Terza stepped out behind him, her heels clicking on the sidewalk. Behind her, her associate juggled a pair of thick, brown accordion files, each brimming with meticulously-labeled manila folders. A yellow legal pad covered in hand-scrawled notes threatened to spill out of the folder where it had been stuffed haphazardly. Quatre reached back and caught the glass door before it slammed in the man’s face.

The associate gave Quatre a look of tired gratitude. “Thanks,” he muttered. Otto, he called himself. He must have been around the same age as Quatre, if he’d enlisted in OZ at fifteen, but Quatre suspected he didn’t often interact directly with clients.

Terza produced an expensive-looking pair of sunglasses from her briefcase and perched them on her nose. They were fashionably oversized and obscured her face, making her look more like a movie star than a lawyer, like some kind of Hollywood attorney who pulled out an underdog win for her clients in the third act every time. A small part of Quatre scoffed at the new-money excess of flashy designer sunglasses, but mostly he felt very unglamorous by comparison, shielding his face with his hand in a perpetual salute.

Terza herded Quatre and her associate away from the door as Quatre paged his driver. Within minutes, they had shuffled into the back cabin of one of the more understated of Quatre’s corporate limousines, Quatre facing the two members of his legal team. Otto clutched the folders as though they would explode if he loosened his grip for even a moment. Terza pushed the sunglasses up over her forehead.

“That could’ve gone much worse,” she said.

“It could’ve been much better too,” Quatre admitted. “Though, all told, I’d rather be sued by shareholders than picketed by workers.”

“There wasn’t a lot you could do about it,” Terza said, in a manner that would have been reassuring, to someone who could be reassured by knowing that a situation was out of his control. Quatre was not that kind of person.

“It’s true,” Otto piped up, tentatively. “All the really—the really embarrassing stuff.” He didn’t have to specify. Quatre knew what he meant. “Assuming you really were a Gundam pilot, they already knew all of that. That may have been what they were trying to insinuate about Father Maxwell and Mr. Bloom.”

“So I might have just outed myself on the record for no reason at all,” Quatre said. “Great. Why even have this deposition in the first place?”

“It’s like I said in there,” Terza said, nodding back towards the receding form of the office building. “Harassment. None of the things they were hounding you about really have anything to do with the case.”

Quatre scoffed. “Can you imagine if they did? I can see the headlines now. ‘Gay Gundam Pilots Not Allowed to Do Business, Court Says.’ Good thing nobody else will get banned but me.”

Otto snorted. “So you _were_ a Gundam pilot,” he said under his breath, and even to Quatre, it wasn’t immediately obvious whether he said it with disbelief, jealousy, annoyance, awe, or some mix of all four. Probably the mix, if Otto really had been OZ.

Terza’s face remained stone cold. “I’m serious,” she said. “It’s dirty. This whole suit is bullshit. None of this is going to get out publicly. It hurts their equity stake if you have to resign in disgrace over fighting in the same war everyone else did a decade ago. But they’re betting that you’ll be so spooked by the possibility of embarrassing press if we take them to trial that you’ll just settle now for your own peace of mind.”

Quatre sighed. It was too simple for Terza to say that he’d fought in the same war as everyone else years ago when she stopped him in the deposition room before he explained what had happened the first time anyone used the ZERO System. The details of ZERO’s first outing were matters of utmost military secrecy in the new ESUN government. Anyone who really wanted to rattle him and knew to ask would have demanded Quatre tell them how many people he’d killed, how many colonies he’d destroyed. By comparison, none of the actual questions he’d answered could bother him.

“You know what? I don’t care,” he admitted.

“You don’t care?”

“I don’t care,” he reiterated. He didn’t even _want_ to care. “I’m tired of this, and it’s not because of whatever they can say about me, or my past, or if it looks like I’m playing sugar daddy to some starving artist nobody’s heard of. It’s just, it’s silly. It doesn’t make any sense that I can trust Rashid with my life, and nobody questions it, but I trust him with the company—I ask the board if they’ll do it, and they agree—and I get sued because somehow that’s not good faith or not good business judgment.”

“They’re not really saying that,” Terza explained. “This is just gamesmanship. You got unlucky with some bad plaintiffs’ attorneys who think they can extort you. Those lawyers were the ones piloting this shuttle.”

“Is that all it is, though?” Quatre sighed. “Even when I’m not getting sued, I think this whole world is opaque on purpose: the corporate lingo, the business customs. When I told Trowa about this case, he thought a derivative suit meant the shareholders were mad that we weren’t paying out enough _dividends_. He’s the smartest man I know, but he never had to know the difference. And why should he? It’s not like it matters for anybody except the ultra rich.” He let out an angry puff of air. “And we can hire people to understand it for us.”

“Speaking as one of the people you hired to understand it, you’ll win if you keep fighting,” Terza said. “And if they wanted to try to bring this up in court, we have a good case to persuade the judge not to let them.” She handed him her water bottle, and Quatre accepted it gratefully.

“But I understand if you don’t want to,” she said. “I’m sure the other side is already preparing subpoenas for more discovery, so you’ll have to give up who knows how many more books and records, maybe sit through another one of these. And as much as I enjoy hanging out with you in your fancy cars, we’re not exactly taking this case pro bono. You have to think about how much you’re willing to spend. Maybe it’s worth it in the end to cut the process short.”

“Undercutting our fees, eh, boss?” Otto joked nervously. Quatre laughed along with him, mostly to reward the effort at levity.

He unscrewed the cap of Terza’s water bottle and tipped it back carefully to take a drink without touching his lips to the metal rim. The water was calming, but no amount of calm could do anything to change his resolve. “Even if I did keep fighting, and I won, I wouldn’t deserve it anyway,” he said.

“If this is about anything that just happened in there, don’t let it bother you,” Otto said.

“That doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t deserve it even if I hadn’t been sued.”

This seemed to baffle his legal team. Probably, they didn’t often deal with clients who understood just how much of their fortunes weren’t really their own.

“So you do want to settle?” Terza asked.

Quatre nodded. “I think so. Maybe I’m more like my father than I thought. I don’t like the way the game is played, so I take my ball and go home.”

Terza smiled softly and patted his knee. “If you want to work on a settlement, we can talk settlement, but we’ll be strategic. If you really were in the war, then you’d know better than to try negotiating like your father.”

“I’m not about to hold my shares hostage and wait for them to fire,” Quatre agreed. “If they want me out so badly, I’ll leave. They can take the company.” Quatre tried to imagine his imperious father onboard the resource satellite that became his grave saying the same thing—“they can take the asteroid”—and he found that he couldn’t.

“We’ll do our best to reduce the damage, but they’ll probably want more than just cash and your resignation from the board,” Terza explained. “They’ll almost certainly ask you to liquidate some of your shares, at least enough to take away your sole majority vote. Maybe some constituency will even try to buy you out, and we can try to negotiate a premium.”

“Some shares will have to be transferred to family,” Otto said, sounding almost apologetic to have interrupted and corrected his superior. “The corporate charter requires a majority of preferred voting shares be held by Winners or their descendents.”

“If the other side wants me to vote with them to amend that, I’ll do it,” Quatre said.

“Your sisters won’t be mad?” Terza asked, tilting her head in a manner not unlike Iria and Suha. “It’s still possible to have a controlling vote with less than a majority of voting shares, but amending the charter could still mean taking the Winner company out of Winner family control.”

“Maybe some,” Quatre conceded. “But why should my sisters care? They’re keeping their shares. It’s the difference between getting outvoted at a meeting by their baby brother or by a representative from a private equity fund. It’s not as though the old rule did anything for anyone but me.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate soft influence,” Terza said. “The same reason that, once you’re out, Rashid’s job is next. Are you okay with that too?”

“Rashid never wanted the office job anyway.” Quatre hoped his legal team didn’t think he sounded bitter or defeatist. “He said he did, but he was just doing it as a favor to me. He would have fallen on his sword if he thought it would stop this lawsuit. And Trowa never wanted to be with someone who had so many business obligations. Guess he’s getting his wish, in the end.”

“Do you mind if I ask,” Otto sounded tentative.

Quatre didn’t think of himself as the kind of client who would retaliate against his junior legal counsel for speaking out of turn. If he came across that way it was unintentional, but despite all the personal dirt unearthed in the deposition, Quatre’s lawyers had no way of knowing what he was really like. “Go ahead,” he said.

“How did they know about the Gundams, MO-III, all that stuff? You never even told us. Not that—I mean, not that we’d need to know all that in a normal case, but it seems like you did a good job keeping everything under wraps.”

“Not that good.” Quatre sighed and looked out the car window. They were passing through a nice neighborhood of downtown L4-W0936. Quatre owned a handful of condos spread across the glittering, glass buildings—most, he rented out, but he kept one loft empty for himself—and he was sure there was a sister, cousin, or family friend in almost every one of the neighborhood’s other luxury residential buildings. From the outside, they didn’t look too different from the high rises that housed resettled 06E3 refugees.

“I’m sorry if you were surprised, but nothing they said surprised me. All of my sisters knew I was a Gundam pilot,” Quatre said. “Even the ones that didn’t know me. An old family friend helped me too, Sada Ul. That’s thirty people, and who knows who else they told. And it’s not like I covered my face ever during the war, so there’s all my allies, all my enemies. The Maganacs never did either. Not at MO-III, not in the desert, not in space. We were never the best-kept secrets.”

“But it probably helps that ‘the Winner heir is a Gundam pilot’ sounds like a ludicrous conspiracy,” Terza added wryly.

Quatre smiled at her. “It really does.”

“You think some of your sisters disapproved?” Otto asked. “And then they fed intel to the plaintiffs?”

Quatre shook his head. “Iria told me they all supported me, and maybe she was just being nice, but I think it’s true. Or at least it once was true. We all knew what happened to our father. His fight was impotent, and he took a stand that meant nothing in the end—but the Gundams were real. Even the people who supported OZ understood the power of the Gundams. They made a difference.”

“You were a kid,” Terza said. “They supported their youngest sibling getting into a mobile suit on the front lines.”

“Inside of a Gundam might have been the safest place in the whole war,” Quatre pointed out. “And there’s some research that says that teenagers were the only ones who could have piloted the Gundams. Something about brain plasticity. But it’s beside the point. I was the controlling shareholder at fifteen too. My father didn’t even put my inheritance in a trust. If my sisters were forced to accept me as the patriarch of the family, then I suppose they could accept me as a soldier as well.”

No one needed to say that the Winner sisters would have each received a larger portion of the inheritance, if their youngest brother had died in battle, but Quatre wasn’t so jaded yet that he thought anyone had actually hoped for that. Even now, the worst anyone had done was stand aside as an attorney embarrassed him in front of a handful of people he barely knew in a conference room on a Tuesday morning. Maybe they let slip some open secret that Quatre had barely hidden to begin with. That was a small price to pay, for everything he’d been given that he hadn’t earned. He couldn’t believe that he used to think that his inheritance had been only at his sisters’ expense.

“I used to think the Gundam was the deadliest power that anyone handed to me when I was a teenager, but now I’m not so sure,” Quatre said. “We knew how the Gundams hurt people, and we knew what to do with them, or at least we had an idea. We packed them up and sent them into the sun, and when that didn’t work out, we blew them up. We knew they were weapons, and they had no place in Relena’s world of total pacifism.”

Terza picked up on his point quickly. “Corporate violence is a lot harder to see,” she said. “And to disarm.”

Quatre nodded. “When I was in the war, I only recognized the enemy in battle. I only recognized myself as the enemy when I killed people, when I hurt people I loved. When I saw an enemy in my father, it was for his blindness, not his greed.” Even if he’d completed the ZERO System before his father’s death, no computer could have shown him the danger Winner was to the colonies, not when all the data inputs said that all the damage he’d inflicted was generosity. It took Quatre years to see it, even when people were shouting the truth to his face.

“I tried to reform the beast,” Quatre continued. “I increased the wages, I negotiated with the unions, I invested in the colonies, I made Rashid the CEO. But it’s not enough. It was never enough.”

“I’m starting to get an idea how you might want to comply with any requests that you sell your ownership shares,” Terza suggested. “I’m sure you wouldn’t have any trouble finding equity purchasers who would vote to spin off and liquidate Winner Corp assets.”

“I may not be fighting the lawsuit, but I’m not planning to go quietly into the night,” Quatre agreed.

Otto was looking at him strangely. “Are you alright?” Quatre asked.

“It’s nothing,” Otto said, sounding sheepish. He clutched the case files closer to his chest. “It’s just—I was at the Singapore Spaceport Base.” Without saying, they all knew it as the site of the battle where Pilot Zero-Four had self-detonated Gundam Sandrock a decade before, back when OZ and Meteor had meant something. “The tactic sounded familiar, that’s all.”

Quatre almost wanted to laugh at the connection—genuinely this time, and not just out of politeness—but OZ soldiers had died at the Singapore base. It wouldn’t be right. He didn’t know how close Otto had been to Sandrock, if he had ever targeted him personally. Probably not, given that he was still alive.

“I tried fighting OZ on the battlefield, and I tried reforming the company from the inside, by its own rules. But it seems like sometimes the best way forward is to get out and tear everything down behind you on your way.”

“Just glad I’m not your target this time, sir.”

* * *

> I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Subscribed at the offices of Alif & Partners Inter-Sphere Attorneys, Lagrange Point 4 Colony W0936, this 19th day of February, A.C. 206.
> 
>   
>    
> 
> 
> /s/ Quatre Raberba Winner  
>  QUATRE RABERBA WINNER

**Author's Note:**

> Bet you can't guess what my day job is.


End file.
